EXPLORE INTERNATIONAL WATERS WITH BITCHIN BAJAS AND OLIVIA WYATT

posted
March 31st, 2016

Last year, filmmaker Olivia Wyatt invited Bitchin Bajas to add incidental music to the climatic sounds of her feature-length experimental documentary on the nomadic Moken people, Sailing A Sinking Sea. This new album release packages the soundtrack LP with a DVD of the film, thus opening several windows to the eternal questions posed on both formats and providing two distinct pieces of art coming from the same source.

Sailing A Sinking Sea is a feature-length experimental documentary exploring the culture of the Moken people of Burma and Thailand. The Moken are a seafaring community and one of the smallest ethnic minority groups in Asia, traditionally spending eight months out of the year in thatch-roofed wooden boats. Weaving a visual and aural tapestry of Moken mythologies and present-day practices, Sailng A Sinking Sea premiered at SXSW in the 2015 Visions Category, and it went on to receive its international premiere at Hot Docs. Since then, it has gone on to be shown a a number of festivals including Margaret Mead, BFI London, and the Singapore International Film Fest, where it recently won the Audience Choice award!

Bitchin Bajas were tapped to add to the already-existing raft of water sounds and other field recordings captured in the film. The soundtrack mixes film sounds and soundtrack pieces that gave the album an aquatic flow, with waves of water, Moken voices and songs and cascades of autoharp, synth, bells and flute lapping up against each other, producing a sense of time passing in its ultimate way - twined with the epic tail of history and the million forgotten days stretching behind.

Hypnotic interpolation of the energies of Olivia Wyatt's incredible images? Two excellent audio visual components for the price of one? Sign us up! Sailing A Sinking Sea drops on May 13th, get ready!

Also! Check out a screening of the film with a live performance by Bitchin Bajas!